Singapore: Day 5 | Singapour: Jour 5

Hiiiiiiii!!

Many late nights writing these blog posts + the incredible heat & humidity + a very busy day = I’m pretty worn out. I’m going to try to keep this post short for today🙂 I know I’ve been saying this all week – but what a GREAT day! I went to three amazing sessions. The first was on the various forms of smokeless tobacco around the world and their impacts on various societies. For those of you who may have not been aware – smokeless tobacco is no less dangerous for your health, and can even bring higher chances of developing disgusting oral cancer (like this). The second session I attended was a general review of whether or not tobacco control centred on youth has been effective, and a discussion on what more can be done. It’s a fairly simple concept really: if a young people never start smoking or using tobacco products in the first place, then eventually the problem will be eliminated. So how do we make that happen? There was mention of the importance of tapping into youth’s morals and interests and ensuring that campaigns address these, but that more importantly something other than tobacco addresses these.

What do you think would be the best way to prevent kids from ever picking up tobacco? What stopped you; or oppositely, what would have stopped you?

Finally, the last session I attended was one of the importance of using social media in tobacco control. It was my favourite session of the day, which was a tough category to beat out because I really enjoyed the first two! The panellists discussed how incredible it is that in today’s day and age messages are so easily spread out through the internet, by means of social media like Facebook and Twitter (btw – have you followed us yet? @bettertobreathe – get on it!). I know I learned a lot from this session, but I know I can still learn more from you. So tell me…

What kind of things do you look for on the internet? What do you spend most of your time doing? What makes you want to click the “comment”, “like”, “retweet”, and “share” buttons?